Comment by waynecochran
2 days ago
What is the legal precedent for this statement? I am not disagreeing, I just would like to know what the law is.
2 days ago
What is the legal precedent for this statement? I am not disagreeing, I just would like to know what the law is.
It would generally be the opposite, what law gives them standing to sue?
My knowledge as a non-lawyer generally agrees with above, most states won’t allow you to sue for neighbors doing something legal that decreases your property value (CA is the exception I’m aware of, and even then it’s a “sometimes” kind of thing).
I’m not even sure who they’d sue. Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things. You could sue the city to try to prevent the zoning, but sovereign immunity would preclude suing them for doing their job (zoning, in this case).
> neighbors doing something legal
The question is about doing something illegal, such as removing a covenant that was involved in a sale when reselling? If it is something that could have been objected to by the original seller (they would have had standing to sue) and they have not agreed to change the covenant (because they are dead), it seems as if anyone affected should be able to sue.
The breaking of the covenant is what is being sued over.
> Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things.
If my house is zoned for a possible datacenter, that doesn't mean that anyone can build a datacenter there - it is still my house. If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.
The zoning doesn't say "The land must be a datacenter."
edit: It would be bizarre if we can sue over terms of service as if they constitute law, but we couldn't sue over terms of sale. I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.
> If it is something that could have been objected to by the original seller (they would have had standing to sue) and they have not agreed to change the covenant (because they are dead), it seems as if anyone affected should be able to sue.
They don’t because it’s a private agreement, so only the involved parties can sue. In this case, if the original seller died then standing to sue would be inherited (I believe). If the inheritor doesn’t care, then neither does the government.
There’s also a bunch of weird edges. Like if the land just isn’t usable as a park because it’s too out of the way to be worth maintenance or building it would be insane because it’s a literal swamp, what is the city supposed to do with that? Own it and just do nothing with it in perpetuity?
> If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.
Sellers don’t get to do any zoning, the city does. You can add a covenant that says a single family home in San Francisco can only be used for fracking, despite the fact that there’s no oil and zoning wouldn’t allow it.
> I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.
No, you can’t. Or rather, you can file it, but it will be tossed out immediately. There is no tort for failing to enforce your own ToS. You might be able to sue Facebook for negligently failing to stop a user from breaking an actual law.
It’s against Facebook ToS to use a name other than your legal name on your account. How confident are you that you could win a lawsuit against Facebook because Post Malone’s account isn’t named “Austin Post”?
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According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law) the requirements for standing were developed in the Constitution and elaborated in some later cases. To quote from the article, the apt criteria seem to me (2 of the 3):
1. Injury-in-fact: The plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury—an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent (that is, neither conjectural nor hypothetical; not abstract).[44][45] The injury can be either economic, non-economic, or both.
2. Causation: There must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of, so that the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant and not the result of the independent action of some third party who is not before the court.[46] ---
The best way to understand why standing was not found is to read the court's ruling. Unfortunately (but not unusually) 404Media has not linked to the judgement. (I will try to find it.) My guess (IANAL) is the injury is hypothetical or conjectural.
Update: this is the most up-to-date info I could find: Case 15-25-00202-CV
https://search.txcourts.gov/Case.aspx?cn=15-25-00202-CV&coa=...
Pamela Griffin, Ralph Griffin, Michelle Griffin, Corey Griffin, Individually and as Trustee of The Griffin Revocable Living Trust, and Polly Randle
v.
NCP Travis TPP Project, LLC
But the records only go up to February 20th.
There was an interesting case Knife Rights v Garland (v1) where they determined you also don't have standing for imminent jeopardy if no one has done the imminent thing in decades in a way that results in criminal rather than just mere economic damages. This is why those in danger of getting a felony for interstate commerce of switchblades are unable to challenge the law because it's not considered an injury to merely have your business destroyed and your inventory seized.
It would be even worse for city planners if anyone could sue for a reduction in their property values due to a decision they made.
There isn't a single precedent; standing and jurisdiction are like 70% of civil procedure in law school. This page is a good jumping off point: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/standing
Right, standing seems like a series of technicalities until you realize it's fundamentally what keeps judges from becoming philosopher-kings that control the entire rest of the government: judges only exercise power in actual cases and controversies between formally-identified parties.
I find that standing makes judges philosopher-kings in collusion with the rest of the government. If they don't like the plaintiff, they reject them for not having "standing". If they do like the plaintiff, they'll find standing, no matter how thin a connection they have to rely on for it.
For example, the Supreme Court case where they found standing for somebody to refuse to make a same-sex wedding web site, even though nobody had actually asked for one and the person didn't even make wedding web sites. (303 Creative v Elenis)
There was no actual case. The Court invented one because they wanted the opportunity to overturn a state law, and they invented it out of whole cloth.
As opposed to the case where citizens are having their votes essentially erased because of district boundaries explicitly designed to target them. They lack standing to sue over it.
I have zero faith in "standing" as anything other than a tool for picking and choosing on ideological grounds, without having to address any facts of the matter.
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Lots of questions about the colloquial (mis)understading of standing, and the actual standard, so might as well reply here.
IAAL, and the legal precedent is... the doctrine of standing. The article is paywalled halfway down for me, so I don't know the particulars of the complaint, but it's presumably in state court. Either way, most state doctrines are some variant of the essential elements for Article III (federal) standing, which are 1) An injury in fact that has or will imminently occur (i.e., no speculative or indefinite injury); 2) That injury must be a direct consequence (but-for causation) of the defendant's actions or inactions; 3) The injury must be redressable by the court. "Soandso did something and I, an otherwise unconnected party, may potentially lose value on my home's resale value at some undefined point in time in the future" is the type of abstract, speculative injury that never clears the hurdle. To the extent you actually want to soak in the torment of 1Ls everywhere, Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife and TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez are your big ones.
Outside of that, you'd likely need standing created by statute to bring a claim. But standing is just a threshold question that every litigator with a brain will attack because it kills the whole thing before reaching the merits. Even if Ps had standing, the prospects of prevailing aren't great given the timing, parties, and issues involved.
IANAL, but from all the legal podcasts/commentary I consume, I get the general impression that standing is a bit of a mess and is applied in highly inconsistent ways throughout the legal system